Gattomanzo Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 Hi everibody this morning i see things under a different light, found this forum with persons i wanted to talk. I admit that i'm quite naive, but i loved to read all the threads in NL forum regarding the two "banned guys", Adam and Ernest, and i fell really bad when TOM banned 'em. After the deleting of my protest thread for this i wrote a complain email to Oscar Monzon, which is yet unanswered... talking about me, i am a 36 years old university teacher in Italy, i give lessons in some places around my country, and its since september that i've started showing Maxwell to my students, immediately obtaining good results and interest. i'm about to make purchase 20 licenses from 2 schools, but i have this dilemma, because i don't TRUST a society that kicks out people that sustained it with their money, just because they complain about obvious and true facts. and what if the president of my school or one of my students meets TOM? i feel the responsibility of the institute investment into a firm that uses such methods. now i hope that Oscar Monzon reacts in a civil and polite manner, kicking out that Kid and restoring peace in that forum, or soon we'll be all here, banned from there. truly sorry for my horrible english Carlo Gattomanzo Gioventù Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_PopArt Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 Hi gattomanzo! Nice to see you here. I doubt that Oscar Mon (zon) will give a good answer (or any answer) to your message, but its best to deal with NL on a facts alone basis. Better to ignore anything they say or advertize, and base your decision on the software alone. So on the 26th we will all know if it is worth it to buy more licenses:) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yog Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 i'm about to make purchase 20 licenses from 2 schools, but i have this dilemma, because i don't TRUST a society that kicks out people that sustained it with their money, just because they complain about obvious and true facts.Hi Gattomanzo. Yes I can see your dilemma, and it is different than the rest of us. Because I only have to look out for my interests I can make my judgements on a whole raft of issues ... including how much I like the company supplying the product. You on the other hand, as an educator, have (IMHO) a responsibility to focus more on the product rather than the company. If on the other hand you are worried about recommending a product to your management body when you don't really feal you can trust the supply company, then I would say hold off recommending the product for purchase. I would wait until some time after Maxwell has been release and tested by independant users before making a large scale recomendation for purchase. All software is somewhat buggy when first released, and NL have already shown they are prepared to release more buggy software than most (early RC's). As a person who also works for a large company, and has some say over software purchase recommendations, I would be very worried about recommending un-tested software, especially from a company I didn't fully trust. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leoA4D Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 Hi Gattomanzo, I stop by here on occasion too. The above advice is good and solid. I just wanted to add a bit more as to why it is a good idea to wait. There is good, but *unofficial*, information that v1.0, coming out on 26 April '05, will not have all the features promised a year ago and the speed increase (x10) promised Nov. 2005. One missing feature is sun through glass, an essential for archviz work. For v1.0, NL has apparently chosen to develop the core used in the beta version, RS1, that will have new features that were not promised a year ago. Some think the new features are intended to make up for not including all promised features in v1.0 and for v1.0 being very slow. RS1 has been known as a cul-de-sac as far as developing it for more advanced purposes. NL found they could solve the sun through glass issue, and most if not all the other features and speed missing in v1.0, with another core they started to develop, known as RS2. NL decided not to develop RS2 until after v1.0. The most hotly debated questions: 1) Will NL make us pay for RS2 or make it a free update? and 2) When will v2.0, with the RS2 core, come out? Some believe v2.0 is at least a year away. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 I would just second the posts by Yog and leoA4D. At the very least I would wait until you get a clear answer from Next Limit concerning whether there will be an additional charge for the RS2 engine. Coming at it from a different direction, I would also question whether Maxwell is the best choice for teaching. It's a very open question whether Maxwell is ever going to be a viable solution for commercial work, due to its slowness, inherent limitations, and especially due to the deservedly poor reputation of the company behind it. At the same time, Maxwell is quite different to work with compared to other rendering solutions. Putting one and one together, your students could end up with an education that's of little value in the real world. Personally if I was in your position I would teach Mental Ray or VRay. It might be a little harder to achieve good results quickly, but at the end of the day your students will have a better understanding of prevailing rendering technology and they will be more marketable. Once you have mastered an engine like Mental Ray or VRay, it's quite easy to pick up Maxwell, but the reverse is not true. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_PopArt Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 I would disagree with AdamT on this point, in a gentlemanly way:) . While it is true from the practical and production point of view, programs like renderman/mental ray/vray or whatever is necessary to know, for students, learning something like maxwell, which really comes from other programs like WINOSI (which i think is much more accurate than maxwell but much slower) and others (and is being developed very nicely with Indigo) is the best thing to learn. Spectral MLT algorithms are definitely the best and most realistic solutions out there, and for students it is a fun and exciting thing, and from a programming point of view is great because it is very closely tied to natural phenomena, and doesnt waste theoretical time with work arounds for speed and things like that. Light considered as spectral wavelenghts is the most advanced cg implementation so far;) Of course it is too early to be used in production by people who dont have big blue IBM supercomputers (i didnt have one as a student), but it is very interesting and it will be the future of cg, maybe for now the time is premature:) For the limitations of maxwell, they arent limitations inherent to mlt/bi directional algorithms (others like Indigo never had these problems), so I guess thats the problem of NL programmers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jackb602 Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 Another consideration is time. I imagine your students work on a laptop or a fairly standard desktop (i.e. not 4 or 8 cores). In order to get any kind of results from Maxwell, they would need to give up use of their machines for up to several days. In a fast paced school environment, this doesn't seem practical. Jack Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 Another consideration is time. I imagine your students work on a laptop or a fairly standard desktop (i.e. not 4 or 8 cores). In order to get any kind of results from Maxwell, they would need to give up use of their machines for up to several days. In a fast paced school environment, this doesn't seem practical. Jack Well, they could render at postage stamp resolution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gattomanzo Posted April 16, 2006 Author Share Posted April 16, 2006 Well, you can't imagine how much can i be grateful now for having a thread about good/bad in Maxwell Render without Tom/Mihai between the balls (eheheheh), and without fear that this thread can be closed... HAPPY EASTER FRIENDS!!! you gave me precious advices, keep on talk! i will treasure them. I've started my teacher career in 98 teaching Softimage|3D, after that I teach Softimage|XSI since 2000. Mental Ray is good, very good, but you must know that here in Italy the situation in Schools is more critical as time passes. When in 2001 i had 180 hours course, i can touch every aspect of basic 3d, modeling animating and rendering, and mental ray was my strong point because students can truly learn to use it in a decent way. Now my course is around 60 hours, and i assure you, is nearly impossible to do a decent argument to the end. After around 30 hours on modelling (animation is a dream), using XSI and Zbrush, i must teach to render in a more than possible faster and effective manner. Using maxwell during my lessons it was a big surprise, because they produce something nice since the first renders, and only in the last hours of lesson i let them pratice on Vray or Mental Ray. This method gave me results that made me proud, now you can imagine how much is hard to take the Next Limit behaviour... Speed is not THAT important, because i cannot think to complete a 3d artist from scratch in so limited time, what i'm aiming for is to give him a precise idea of what 3d graphic is, and after my course finished, let him choose his tool for 3djob independently. thanks for your kind attention, keep write to me! Gattomanzo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gattomanzo Posted April 16, 2006 Author Share Posted April 16, 2006 i'm showing you what i'm doing now with maxwell... http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=13450&stc=1&d=1145208199 (mmh here shold been a picture! help me) C&C are more than welcome Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 Hey that's a pretty cool render. I also do some university teaching - I'm the TA for the undergrad computer applications class, the prof teaches AutoCAD then I get about 8 hours of class time to cover laser cutting, basic Viz and rendering to whatever extent is possible. I guess it's a bit easier for me since I can gloss over modeling and tell them to import their AutoCAD 3D models, and not teach animation. I use Vray Free for all this. It's not incredibly powerful, it's missing a few things, but it's fast (and now we have Viz running on respectable P4-3.6/ATI x700/1.5GB systems, which helps in that department) and easy to use, easier even than Maxwell - and lets me teach my procedural texture tricks. BTW, where are you in Italy? I did a study abroad in Florence a few semesters ago. We had a professor who gave us a speech on how "computers are not appropriate for use in Italy." After another one explained to me in no uncertain terms that "it is impossible to design architecture without first doing a complete urban analysis," I decided the best approach was to do a quick project in Sketchup, spend the extra time going to museums and discovering the good vino and not mind if I got a crappy grade in the class - turns out I was right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_PopArt Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 H BTW, where are you in Italy? I did a study abroad in Florence a few semesters ago. We had a professor who gave us a speech on how "computers are not appropriate for use in Italy." After another one explained to me in no uncertain terms that "it is impossible to design architecture without first doing a complete urban analysis," I decided the best approach was to do a quick project in Sketchup, spend the extra time going to museums and discovering the good vino and not mind if I got a crappy grade in the class - turns out I was right. hehe...welcome to the educational system in Italy. Fortunately theres alot of good wine, so you made a good choice:) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 hehe...welcome to the educational system in Italy. Fortunately theres alot of good wine, so you made a good choice:) That's the funny part - it's a Syracuse University program and the profs are Americans. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gattomanzo Posted April 16, 2006 Author Share Posted April 16, 2006 i teach in Macerata, Milano and Ancona Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kippu Posted April 16, 2006 Share Posted April 16, 2006 thats a nice render gattomanzo ... i been wondering how to get that splash for one of my fun projects .... any pointers prof Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gattomanzo Posted April 16, 2006 Author Share Posted April 16, 2006 just use zbrush pal... thanks for your kind comments Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yog Posted April 17, 2006 Share Posted April 17, 2006 Hi Gattomanzo. Despite Next Limit's behavour, and uncertainties over how well their support may or may not be, I do think it is worth including Maxwell as part of your training program, if only to show another aspect of the rendering possibilities. However, I would be a little reluctant to base your entire rendering lessons on Maxwell. Two reasons, first it is untested in the wider industry, and second I would be tempted to teach software that your students are more likely to use in the working environment. At present I'm not sure how well Maxwell will fair, even in industries most suited to it's strengths, i.e. architecture. Whilst it's true that more than any other clients, architects appreciate good quality lighting, and will be prepared to pay a little more for better lighting simulation, even architects wont pay too much over the odds for overlong render times. I generally present new clients a range of render samples (from flat shaded, to photorealistic) together with likely pricings for each. Whilst just about all really like the Maxwell renders (mainly for the natural external light quality), I've not had one that was prepared to pay the asking price. Most usually opt for the almost as good, but a lot cheeper Vray renderings. I hear all the time people on the Next Limit forum (generally from members of the A-Team), that Maxwell whilst relatively slow at actual rendering, they find they are as fast as other renderers, if not faster, because they can predict how the materials will react and so enter material settings right at the start without having to do loads of test renders. Personally I find this puzzelling, because if you have used any renderer for any length of time you have a fealling for how materials will react right from the start. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamT Posted April 17, 2006 Share Posted April 17, 2006 I hear all the time people on the Next Limit forum (generally from members of the A-Team), that Maxwell whilst relatively slow at actual rendering, they find they are as fast as other renderers, if not faster, because they can predict how the materials will react and so enter material settings right at the start without having to do loads of test renders. Personally I find this puzzelling, because if you have used any renderer for any length of time you have a fealling for how materials will react right from the start. Actually I think material testing is one of M~R's huge weaknesses. In order to judge, e.g., bump height, you need a really noise-free image, and that can take days to achieve. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gattomanzo Posted April 17, 2006 Author Share Posted April 17, 2006 yog: well, my courses are not tatally on maxwell, i'm including it, as you say, as example of rendering possibility... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted April 17, 2006 Share Posted April 17, 2006 I'm going to join in with most of the others and say that it's probably not a good idea to buy Maxwell until you know what you’re getting. If it were me I would wait until after V1.0 came out and people had a chance to put it through its paces and truly find out if it's capable of doing what the "A-Team" says it can do (they've made statements before about Maxwell that turned out to be untrue). I'd want to find out what is going to come after V1 is released, what features will be added, how long till V2 is released, will you have to pay to upgrade and how much will the upgrade be? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gattomanzo Posted April 17, 2006 Author Share Posted April 17, 2006 another WIP for Shasa logo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bongo51 Posted April 18, 2006 Share Posted April 18, 2006 I don't know about teaching Maxwell... it's kinda like teaching renderman... I think looking at renders from the two competing renderers would be enough for students to get the idea... and perhaps a demo of how a shader/light simulation works vs. the current method of 'faking' real light phenomenon... not to mention that Maxwell though a brilliant idea and perhaps the future of rendering technology is being developed by what I can only describe as a PR and consumer nightmare company. I have never seen a company mistreate it's users as much as Next Limit has and IS. I surely am hoping that my alpha investment of $400 turns into a functional V1 product (more then a year late) but I wouldn't recommend buying in for a bit, even to save some $... they are now saying that basic features PROMISED to those who paid up will not be in V1... like for example fog, or a plugin for Vue Infinite... that stuff just vanished without comment. Not right in my books. Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gattomanzo Posted April 18, 2006 Author Share Posted April 18, 2006 thanks for your precious advices Ian, and welcome to this forum! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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